


marry her anyway

by groove_bunker



Category: Carol (2015)
Genre: F/F, the title is shit but it's all i can think of when I think of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:40:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5735326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groove_bunker/pseuds/groove_bunker





	marry her anyway

The first time she asks, she’s dancing around their new apartment, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of something in the other, generally getting in the way of the men delivering her furniture, while Therese is desperately trying to get her to calm down and compare paint samples.

“Forget about the paint. I couldn’t care less about the paint. Marry me, Therese, and you can paint the apartment whatever colour you wish.”

Therese sighs and the guy bringing in the side tables, who doesn’t look to be much older than 18, chuckles.

“You sure you’re alright living with her miss? She’s sure got some strange ideas.”

Carol glares at him while Therese insists that she’s more than happy living there, thank you very much.

{~}

20 something years later, and they’re tucked away at the back of a church out in New Jersey, watching Rindy walk down the aisle. Therese is sitting between Carol and Abby, who are both threatening to flood the church with their sobbing. Harge’s mother keeps looking back at them and doing that annoying sniffing thing that she does whenever Carol dares to enter her space. Therese looks her dead in the eye until she turns back to look at the young man standing at the altar.

“We don’t go to enough weddings, I love weddings, they’re beautiful.”

Abby’s been swigging from a flask under her coat all morning and Therese might have to confiscate it before they make the drive back to the house for the reception. Carol turns to look at her, her eyes full of tears.

“I asked you to marry me once, do you remember?”

(The apartment, which felt so enormous with just her and Carol and their future ahead of them, the space which had filled suddenly with something when Carol made the ludicrous statement and when Therese just…hadn’t answered)

“You were trying to get out of choosing paint colours.”

“And in the end, you made a perfectly adequate decision.”

“You two don’t need to get married. You already bicker like you are. Now shush, Harge’s mother has given us terrible seats, I can barely hear anyway.”

Therese wonders if Abby ever asked Carol to leave Harge, marry her instead, as if they could make the impossible possible. Abby’s the kind of woman who would like to try, especially if she was trying for Carol. She supposes it doesn’t matter much now, Carol and Abby were built to fall apart, not like the two of them. She wonders if she could make the impossible possible; move mountains for Carol like she knows Abby would.

She wants to be able to.

{~}

It’s not long before Rindy’s bringing Carol’s grandchildren to visit, and every time they do, it’s like a tiny stab in the heart for Therese. Maybe children were never meant to be for her, and she regrets none of her time with Carol, the years they’ve spent together, but she never had the chance. She treats the small children like they are her own, and even Carol, who once bought her only child the most expensive train set in the store just because

(‘just because you were so…enticing’ she tells Therese one evening, already half way to being drunk, her eyebrow quirked in a way that always makes Therese’s heart skip a beat, ‘and to be fair, darling, it was Christmas’)

comments on how Therese spoils them.

One day, the boy, Lincoln, older than his seven years, looks up from the book he’s reading and looks directly at Therese.

“Why aren’t you married, Auntie Therese?”

(She has always been Auntie Therese, like Abby is still Aunt Abby. Great Aunt Abby makes her feel old.)

“They don’t let people like me get married, sweetpea.” He quirks his head, and Carol, who’s sitting on the couch next to him, quirks her eyebrow. “I’m an alien, I’m not allowed. But don’t tell anyone, or they’ll try to send me back.”

She and Carol may not be able to get married, but she’ll always be her girl, flung out of space.

{~}

Abby is laying in a hospital bed, a fragile caricature of herself, ranting at the nurses for not allowing her one cigarette even as the cancer is eating away at her lungs and she can barely breathe for coughing. Carol slips in and waves a flask at her, and they giggle like school girls, trying to pretend that there’s not a chance that this might be the last time.

“Did you call her?”

(Therese is half way around the world, inching closer to New York, desperately trying to make her way home, to hold them all together when everything is falling apart. That’s what she has to do, now that Abby won’t be able to for much longer.)

“She’s on her way.”

“I was always jealous of you, you know? Finding her, finding that.”

“I was lucky. We were both lucky, you know? Things could be so different.”

(they could still be running around behind Harge's back, Carol could have given in to his demands and still be playing Stepford Wife number 3 out in the suburbs, Therese could have been a distant fleeting memory; a girl she once saw in a toy store with the most beautiful eyes)

“I wish they were. I wish I’d been able to see you get married, to someone you loved. I do love a wedding.”

“We don’t go to enough, right?”

Abby nods and drifts off to sleep, clutching Carol’s hand in hers. When Therese comes rushing in, panting like she’s run all the way from the airport, her eyes flicker open again.

“Take care of her, Therese. Please…take care of her.”

Those are the last words that Abby Gerhard says on Earth, although Therese always fancies that she had some choice ones for whoever she met when she got wherever she was going. Therese feels like she’s in another world as doctors and nurses rush in, to try to do whatever they can, another world where all that exists are her and Carol and their grief. When she looks over, she finds Carol staring at her, a strange look in her eyes, one that she can’t place, not here, not now.

(it’s the same look she had in her eye in the apartment, years ago, when she refused to choose paint sample, Therese would realise later, much later, when they’re back in their house, curled up in bed)

“Marry me.”

It’s barely verbalised, and even if it was, Therese wouldn’t hear it amongst the chaos of a room where someone has just died. But she reads her lover’s perfectly painted lips, and for the first time, she gives an answer.

A single nod. 

Carol smiles.

Abby would have liked that.

{~}

May the 19th, 2004 dawns in Boston just as any day normally would. Therese wakes up in the hotel room to hear the shower running and Carol singing. That’s not new either. Breakfast, with the family, is no different to how it would be at home, loud and mad and joyful. People stare and tut and shake their heads. Carol shrugs them off.

“I’m allowed to be happy, it’s my wedding day.”

There are no superstitions – they’ve made it this far, no amount of bad luck is going to change that. Carol helps Therese into her dress and does her makeup. They reminisce about another hotel room, a lifetime ago, where they almost kissed but fear got the better of them. There’s no fear today and Therese ends up doing her lipstick again in the bathroom. The walk to the city hall is almost subdued, even though they know that today is the day, that everything has been leading up to this. Even when it hasn’t, and even when it never seemed to matter.

Lincoln slips a tiny plastic UFO into Therese’s bouquet and she smiles.

It’s a tiny ceremony and there’s a huge Abby shaped hole next to Carol as they say their short vows. Rindy cries like her mother did at her wedding, and when they leave the building, the sun is shining down on them. Therese reckons that Abby did it especially, and Carol laughs and says that if Abby had anything to do with it, it would be pouring with rain to protest her absence.

Therese supposes that, as usual, she’s right.


End file.
